probably been quite intrigued when those slabs passed by.
“No. Though it does look somewhat familiar… a little like the writing the duergars use, but harsher. More primitive.”
Sabira felt something cold tiptoe down her spine at the dwarf’s words. She’d never seen duergar writing, and only knew one word in their language: eddarghe. The name for a ghastly white flower that was also shared by the half-duergar assassin who’d kidnapped and tortured Ned, and had ultimately been responsible for his death. Eddarga- Nightshard — had also killed almost two dozen people in her decade-long killing spree, almost adding Sabira, Aggar, and the entire population of Frostmantle to her tally before she was done.
Sabira had hoped to never cross paths with another of the deep-dwelling dwarves again-though she knew Gunnett, Eddarga’s sister and accomplice, was still out there somewhere, plotting against Aggar and the rest of the Tordannon family. Her family, now. But it somehow hadn’t occurred to her that she might encounter duergar on this excursion into the depths, and the idea filled her with dread. A dread she quickly stomped on and kicked aside. She was here to save Tilde and if any of Nightshard’s distant kin got in her way, they’d suffer the same fate the assassin had. It was that simple.
They rounded a boulder the size of a small house and the cavern that housed the rest of Trent’s Well and the entrance to Tarath Marad opened up in front of them like the mouth of the mountain. Here, the path was shadowed, and the everbright globes along its edge sprang to life, bathing them all in an icy bluish light. As they walked from the heat of the desert morning into the relative coolness of the cave, Sabira couldn’t repress a shiver that had very little to do with the temperature change.
The last time she’d gone beneath a mountain, her companion had died-a slow, agonizing, brutal death. She couldn’t help but wonder which of her new companions would do the same on this trip.
Several buildings dominated the floor of the huge cavern, situated on either side of a rushing river that flowed in from the west and went back out again on the east side. A stone bridge led from one side to the other, lit by more of the blue everbright lanterns, though these ones floated overhead instead of protruding from the ground.
Sabira could see a smithy, what looked like the sort of general supply store common to rural towns and even a small tent with a hand-lettered sign set outside that read, “Artifact Collector.” There were other buildings, built mostly of stone and scavenged wood, that Sabira assumed were homes.
It didn’t take much guesswork to determine which one belonged to the mayor. A massive two-story structure, it was the only house that boasted a facade constructed from the remains of giantish ruins, complete with massive faces on either side of the door. They had to have been transported all the way from Stormreach at considerable cost. Sabira wondered again at the “usage fee” and the mind behind it.
There appeared to be a line of people waiting to see the mayor, so Sabira turned to Greddark.
“No point in all of us wasting our time here. Why don’t you take the others and see what sort of supplies you can scrounge up for us? I’d like to head out tonight. Tomorrow, at the latest.” She pulled out Breven’s letter of credit. “Charge what you need to; don’t worry about the cost.”
“Because none of us will be around for the Baron to collect from if we go over his limit, anyway?” Greddark asked semi-seriously as he took the paper and tucked into a pocket.
“No. To make sure we are,” she replied, making sure they all heard her. Whatever her private thoughts on their odds, she needed to project confidence. “What we don’t have in quantity, we’re going to have to make up for in quality. Nobody I’d trust more to make that call than a dwarf.”
“A fellow dwarf,” Greddark corrected, raising a few eyebrows among Laven’s men. No — her men, now. Best to make sure they knew it before they headed into the darkness.
“Greddark’s my second in this. Whatever he asks or tells, it comes from me. Clear?”
Laven answered for them all.
“As a diamond, and twice as precious.”
Sabira nodded.
“Get to it, then. Hopefully I’ll be done with this nonsense by the time you get back.” As they began to disperse, she called out. “Zi! A word?”
The wizard looked at Laven first, but the Vadalis man ignored him, sending a not-so-subtle message that he wasn’t the one Zi should be asking for direction anymore. Sabira appreciated the support; she’d had a feeling the bald man would prove troublesome.
Zi walked over to her side, looking at her warily.
“Yes?”
“Where’d you get your training?’
“Excuse me?” He drew himself up, clearly affronted that she’d felt the need to ask. But she had neither the time nor the inclination to coddle his ego.
“It’s a simple question-the kind I normally expect my employees to provide an answer to, not another question. Do I need to repeat it?”
Zi’s face was a smooth as his head so he had no brows to draw together in anger, but he didn’t need them. It was there in his eyes and in the hard set of his jaw.
“No, Marshal. I learned from my mother, who learned from hers. I’ve had no formal training.”
Sabira hadn’t been expecting that. While self-taught mages weren’t unheard of, most at least spent some time studying with the masters at Arcanix, or the Tower of the Twelve, or one of the other smaller arcane colleges throughout the Five Nations. Well, she amended silently, most who were any good.
“What would be your assessment of your skills in relation to say, an instructor at Arcanix?”
“I have no idea; I’ve never met one,” Zi replied bluntly. “Why that particular unit of measure, if I may ask?”
Sabira figured it wouldn’t hurt to let him know, and it might just make him reconsider his superior attitude.
“Because the pretty blonde who went down into Tarath Marad taught there for several years, and all her power and ability didn’t suffice to bring her back out again.”
“So you are here to finish what she started,” Zi said, a smug smile forming at the corners of his mouth.
Well, so much for improving his attitude.
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but I can tell you one thing- you won’t be part of it either way, unless you give me an idea of what you can do. Now.”
Zi considered her for a long moment. Then he shrugged.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Marshal. A list of spells? Would you even know what half of them did?” A valid point, she supposed, but she needed some way to quantify his abilities. She wasn’t used to working with magic-wielders who didn’t also wield more mundane weapons.
She shrugged, waiting.
“How’s this, then? I was born and raised in the Demon Wastes. I left home at eighteen and made it to Sharn, on my own. I lived there for five years before I signed on with a crew out of the Lhazaar Principalities. I rose to first mate before the captain lost a race with a hurricane and steered us into Shargon’s Teeth. I was the only one who survived, and I’ve been in Stormreach ever since. Saved Laven from some trouble in the sewers a few months back and decided to follow him out here when the guard got a little too interested in him.” His dark eyes burned into hers. “Don’t let the pauper’s robes fool you. I may not know cards, Marshal, but I know magic.”
Sabira was impressed in spite of herself. Surviving to age eighteen in the Wastes was an accomplishment in its own right, but to have made the two-thousand-mile journey from there to the City of Towers by himself, crossing some of the wildest and most dangerous terrain in all Khorvaire, was a feat worthy of a bard’s tale. Which might be exactly what he was feeding her, but somehow she didn’t think so-mostly because he didn’t seem to think she was worth the effort. If arrogance was any indicator, he and Tilde probably had comparable skills, based on that alone.
“Well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” Zi inclined his head to her, not quite respectfully, but probably as close as she was going to get until the first time she pulled his backside out of the fire. “Make sure Greddark procures some new robes for you, though. I don’t want someone mistaking you for a tent in the middle of the night. Could be awkward.”
She turned away from him, not waiting for a reply. It was both a dismissal and a show of power-you only turned your back on someone who you either knew wouldn’t attack you, or who you knew you could defeat if they
